The present invention generally relates to facsimile machines, and more particularly to a facsimile machine which has a store and forward (SAF) mode.
In the SAF mode, the facsimile machine transmits an image data which is related to a document and is stored in a memory. Conventionally, when transmitting the image data which are related to documents to a plurality of destinations from such a facsimile machine, an operator sets telephone numbers of each of the destinations and then makes a read operation. The read operation includes scanning of the documents and storing the image data related to the scanned documents into a memory. As a result, the facsimile machine stores each of the set destinations and the corresponding image data which are to be transmitted to the destinations. Therefore, it is possible to successively transmit the image data which are related to the documents to the corresponding destinations.
When transmitting a plurality of pages of a document to a plurality of destinations, there are cases where some of the pages of the document needs to be transmitted to all of the destinations. In other words, the same pages making up a part of the document are transmitted to each destination. But in the case of the conventional facsimile machine, the image data are stored for each destination, and the image data which is stored for one particular destination is transmitted as it is for this one particular destination. Accordingly, even when some of the pages of the document need to be transmitted to all of the destinations, the scanning of the document pages is made independently for each destination, and the image data related to the scanned document pages are stored independently for each destination.
For this reason, the conventional facsimile machine suffers from a problem that it takes a long time to scan the document pages and store the image data related to the scanned document pages for each of the destinations. In addition, the image data which are related to the same document page occupy a large memory area of the memory, and there is a problem in that it is impossible to efficiently make use of the memory capacity of the memory.